Thoughts on enlarging your training
09/Nov/08
We just had our black belt exam in kobudo this last Saturday. Ten people lasted the entire curriculum out of over 50 who have attended at some time or other during the last two and a half years. It is a testament to not only these martial artists but to the instructors who have spent extra time making sure each student received the training they desired. I can single out Randy Miller as one teacher who has offered many hours of his own time. Of course the students themselves have to make the effort to train. Congratulations to everyone. You can see some photos on the current gallery and the list of promotions on the news page.
It has been a long road for the AKaTo kobudo classes over the last sixteen years since Mike Proctor, Jon Baughman and I developed the original curriculum. We have taught at the Richardson and Garland YMCAs, at the Cooper Fitness Center (where the classes are now regularly held) and some of us can even remember the bank rotunda in downtown Dallas. We started the class because too many times martial artists become bored with the same old thing. I’ve trained and taught for over forty years and have yet to tire of wrapping my belt around my waist and heading off to class. But I realize that isn’t typical. Still, I like to learn new stuff as much as the next person and some of my most exciting times in the martial arts have been when I took up something new like when I first started branching out into ju-jutusu and later kobudo, both with Ted Gambordella. Meeting Jon Baughman over twenty years ago through Bryan Robbins at SMU and later Garrett Seaback enlarged my exposure to traditional weapons. Of course Mike Proctor had already had much practice and training with the traditional approaches. So I wanted to give some of the AKaTo members (then the STA members) some of the same broad exposure to other arts.
So now we wrap up our sixth class of kobudo black belts we look forward to a seventh session starting in April of 2009. The thought occurs to me that I’ll be sixty years old when we promote students of of this group to black belt sometime in 2011. I’m not done learning new things yet and I hope you have the same attitudes. Perhaps you’ll be one of the new faces at the next session.